When the week had expired, he wrote her a note. He hesitated over the phrasing; though he had little knowledge of such matters, dimly he felt that certain sentiments, when written down, lost their souls—yes, certain sentiments, like music, existed only as sounds—sighs, laughter, whispers, gasps—or not at all. He did use an intimate form of address, remembering that unbidden “Serezha” she had bestowed upon him the night of the billowing curtains, the night in her room; but his wording was restrained, and out of some vague sense of discretion he avoided addressing or signing the note.
Unable to find any means of passing it in person, he finally left it with the girl of the door-handle face, who had switched to morning shifts as well; the line had been in a state of restless flux for some time now. “Well, all right,” she said doubtfully, “I’ll ask my father to hand it over. The woman with the toothache, right?”
“The woman with lovely eyes,” Sergei said sternly. “Sofia Mikhailovna.”
The girl made a lukewarm effort to suppress a titter. “I’ll tell him,” she said, sticking the envelope negligently into her bag alongside a bunch of withered leeks.
He waited a day, then three, then a full week, but there was no word; he wanted to ask, but the girl had now been replaced by a large, matronly woman trapped behind the bars of a faded striped dress, peering at Sergei with hostile glances. He felt time drifting away from him; he stopped counting the days that passed, gray, chilled, damp, swiftly shrinking toward winter. One darkening afternoon, as he walked away from the line, he was approached by a man wearing a homburg and carrying a briefcase; the man’s face, hidden in the shadow of the hat, was indistinct.
“Do I have the pleasure of addressing Sergei Vasilievich?” the stranger inquired, amiably touching the hat’s brim. “Well, and in that case, are you not aware of the vagrancy laws, which state most clearly that all able-bodied citizens must be gainfully employed or be confronted by the consequences of their parasitism?”
The light was fading fast in the deserted street, and the man’s face too appeared to gray rapidly, his features becoming still harder to pin down; the black automobile that loitered at the next corner seemed merely a dark shape cut out of the nearing night and pasted onto the evening. Sergei felt as if he were being interrogated by a ghost—or else as if he were a ghost himself, insubstantial, invisible save to other ghosts, passing through the city, through life, through time as through dust, without leaving a trace. And as he stood staring into the obscure face of his interrogator, he remembered the pale, infinite sky he had seen the previous winter, in the early days of the line, and the clear crystal notes he had imagined ringing in its vastness, floating above the city, soaring higher and higher in imperceptible phrases of perfectly sustained beauty—and his heart sickened.
“I’m ill,” he stammered out.
“Ill?” his ghostly tormentor repeated, shaking his head in sympathy. “You don’t say. And where, then, is your certificate from a doctor?”
“At home,” Sergei replied, almost inaudibly.
“You will be so good as to present it tomorrow at the district bureau,” the man said gleefully. He touched his fingers to his ghostly hat again and strolled away toward his silhouette car.
Sergei spent the remaining hours of the day rushing along the corridors of a neighborhood clinic, pleading with cleaning women who irritably banged their filthy mops against his shoes, until at last, after dusting a few hallways with his jacket and having two or three doors slammed in his face, he found himself sitting across a scuffed desk from a fat, red-jowled man in a once white coat, who looked so much like the theater director that for a second, upon entering his office, Sergei had a vertiginous sensation of spaces and days slipping, colliding, overlapping, throwing him off his already precarious balance. The director’s twin gazed musingly into the middle distance until Sergei thought to empty the sad contents of his wallet onto the desk’s surface. His expression bored, the man counted the bills with an expert fluidity, wrote a few words on a scrap of paper, negligently stamped it with a round red stamp and a square blue stamp, and, still without looking at Sergei, reached for the telephone.
Sergei’s ghost, confounded and invisible as ever, edged out of the office.
The next morning, as he stood in line, feeling his empty pockets, wondering how he would pay if the tickets happened to go on sale just then, he glimpsed his son striding across the street. “Hey there,” he called out. “Lectures ended early?”
The boy approached, his face flickering with an odd expression, almost a cringe.
“Such a nuisance,” Sergei muttered, busy removing a leaf from the crook of his sleeve, “I seem to have forgotten my wallet at home. Could you stop by the school if you’re free, and ask your mother? I only need enough for the ticket—in case, well, you know—”
“Yeah, sure,” Alexander said, moving off.
He was anxious to escape before his father asked further questions.
They would find out soon enough, he supposed—but not yet, not just yet.
The pavements were slippery with shallow burials of sodden leaves; the air hung thick with the smells of mushroom pies, rain, and decay. Alexander had an odd, displaced feeling as he walked through the streets. For a decade the road to school, with its shuffled pack of familiar landscapes—the row of kiosks by the tram stop, the shortcut through the little playground, the alley with ugly brown buildings wedged into the recesses of dark mornings, the movie theater raising its Neanderthal’s brow over the sidewalk—had been the frame on which he had stretched his life, like predetermined lines connecting dots in an uninspired children’s game; yet now the streets were beginning to assume a kind of vagueness, the smudged unreality of an uncertain memory, and soon even that tenuous quality would dissipate, for soon, very soon now, this threadbare, graying city would be no more, this life would be no more, and he—he would be walking other streets in other cities, cities not at all like this one, cities brightly colored and tangible, bestowing upon him the long-awaited gift of their immense, stage-lit presence.
His practical preparations were nearly finished. He had gathered his few belongings and stored them under his bed, ready to be thrown into a bag at a moment’s notice; his shoes were too tight, but Stepan had promised to find him a suitable pair of sneakers. He had already written the letter (though he kept adding pages to it now and then); he planned to hand it over after the concert, when Viktor Pyetrovich took him backstage. “Here’s my address,” he would say in a measured, mature voice, as soon as the two cousins disengaged from their tearful embrace—or no, as soon as they stopped grasping each other’s hands, that was better, more fitting. “Please read this, Igor Fyodorovich.” Then he would run, no, walk, home, the snow crunching under his new shoes for the first and last time, and sit waiting in the dark, and hours would pass and the snow would fall and fall, and just as I begin to despair, there is a knock on my door, and he is standing in the shadows of the landing. I was so moved by your letter, young man, he says, or no, “young man” sounds condescending, he would just call me by name, Alexander, he will say, I see how alike we are, our two roaming, thirsty, adventurous spirits, you’re like the son I never had, I went to the embassy this evening and obtained permission for you to come with me, when can you leave?